Get The Folk Out Of Here

If fans of Noah And The Whale’s folkish and slightly twee first album, Peaceful, The World Lays Me Down, were confused by the more introspective and autobiographical second record, The First Days Of Spring (and falling record sales suggest they were), they’re going to be totally bamboozled by the Talking Heads-meets-Lou Reed-meets-Billy Joel story-telling of Last Night On Earth.

Songwriter Charlie Fink is clearly not a man who finds a furrow and then continuously ploughs it. While the downbeat second record might have confounded expectations by so honestly and earthily charting the end of his relationship with nu-folk fellow-traveller Laura Marling, the new one hardly uses the first person at all. It talks instead about a depersonalised cast of third-person characters, and is sonically coloured, not by fiddles and the labour of percussionists, but by synths and the quantised ticking of pre-programmed beats.
Why the change of tack?
“Well, I’d written a film [which runs for the length of the second album and is also called The First Days Of Spring],” he explains. “And that showed me that I could write scenes and stories. I wanted to explore that more. It’s not that I was afraid of writing another really personal album. I find it much easier to be candid in a song than anything else. I think that’s partly why I started writing songs: because I felt the need to express something. I’ve always invested a great deal of myself into my songs. I wasn’t trying to get away from that. It was that I wanted to challenge myself. I wanted to try and develop as a songwriter. Song-wise, writing ‘Tonight’s The Kind Of Night’ was a breakthrough for me. That’s the one that stands out. I remember writing that on the train going to London, when I had I knew I’d found the theme of the album: the romance of the nighttime and the endless possibility of it.”
There’s a sense of Fink making a definitive break from the much hyped nu-folk scene of 2007/2008, which featured Laura Marling, Johnny Flynn, Mumford and Sons and a batch of other ukulele strumming troubadours.
“I always try to look forward,” he explains. “It was a good time, but it really only existed for a few months before everyone went off and started getting record deals. I definitely have fond memories of it all and Laura is still a good friend. She was playing in LA when we were recording and we’re still very much in touch. But I think people tend to romanticise the past.”
Has he changed much since then?
“Starting out I had no real idea any of this could happen,” he reflects. “We were taking things as they came. As we got more opportunities and more chances to make records, I started wanting to challenge myself more. I’ve already started writing some songs for the next one. Which is a nice position to be in!”

Last Night On Earth is out on March 15. Noah And The Whale play The Academy on May 8.